Hi 👋 I'm Ben and I make things for the web. Sometimes I write things here and sometimes I talk about things. I'm also a husband & father, football (soccer) addict and a Christian.

I recently had the privilege of being invited to give my first ever meetup talk at SydCSS. It was a first time speakers night so short talks (5 mins) and high nerves were the order of the day. On a recent side project I had wasted a bunch of time creating a fancy loading spinner while I was mentally blocked trying to solve a real problem. I had the idea at the time that I could probably give a reasonably interesting talk by making some loading animations with CSS and explaining the interesting parts of the CSS animation API used for each animation. »

This is not a particularly well-written article. I’ve found everything here useful, but so irregularly that I always end up Googling and needing to put together info from multiple blog posts so I’m putting it all together here for my reference, and maybe it’ll help you if you stumbled across it. At some stage I’ll organise this into a proper article. [Update 2017-04-07] I’ll probably never actually update this article. »

This article is a part of a series, if you haven’t read the first or second parts yet you can read them here and here. Alternatively you can get the code from the end of the last article here and continue along. You can view the finished app here and all of the source code is available here.
Implement the single post view Now that we can navigate to a new page/view, let’s start building out the view properly. »

This article is a part of a series, if you haven’t read the first part yet you can read it here. Alternatively you can get the code from the end of the last article here and continue along. You can view the finished app here and all of the source code is available here.
Implement the main list of posts view Getting a list of posts is all well and good, but not particularly exciting if we’re just going to show a count of the number of posts. »

I’ve had a fascination with functional programming for a few years now, but despite taking a quick look at Haskell I’ve not invested much time actually learning a functional language. I’ve generally tried to approach my front-end development from a functional mindset, keeping functions pure, trying not to mutate objects, always using things like map, filter and reduce to manipulate collections. One of my main complaints/observations with functional languages is that they don’t seem to be immediately practical, there seems to be a big step between picking up the fundamentals and basics of the language, and actually building something useful with it. »